That was my exact process too, got to that section about Aronson, saw the scrollbar, and got out of there.
Looks like you followed my next step too, jumped into the comment section to see if someone posted about an interesting highlight that I might have missed by skipping the rest of the article :)
Your hypothesis made sense to me, so I did a bit of research to try and back up the claim.
No idea about the biases or accuracy of the information supplied in these links, so take it with a grain of salt, but they seem to support the idea that Solar (installation) is indeed more dangerous than Nuclear per TWh.
Too many factors to call it more "dangerous", and also disingenuous because the absolute worst case scenario for solar power doesn't have the possibility of negatively impacting millions of peoples lives.
But hey, this is a bit of a fun fact that might stop people demonising nuclear energy so much.
The absolute worst case scenario for Chernobyl would have happened if the corium had melted through to the water table and caused a huge steam explosion. This was narrowly avoided. It's hard to estimate the impact but at the very least a much larger area would have been heavily irradiated.
Deaths/TrKWhr isn't a useful measure, because nuclear has a binary risk profile. When it goes badly wrong it does a lot of lasting economic damage, in ways that other energy sources don't.
There's also no way to compare "TCO" like for like because coal etc are nasty immediate pollutants, while nuclear waste remains a problem for a very long time.
The real problem with nuclear isn't the technology, it's the trustworthiness of the management culture around it. If the industry was a byword for truth, honesty, and straight dealing it would be perceived in a much less negative way.
That doesn't seem to be how the industry operates.
Interestingly enough Wiki notes a EU study[0][1] that shows that nuclear and wind are some of the cheapest energy sources when you price in environmental effects and health costs.
People "demonizing" nuclear typically do it because of the potential devastating consequences of an accident, and the uncertainty of storing waste for thousands of years. Not because they think nuclear have a high death toll in everyday use.
But the potential devastation isn’t rooted in reality - anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl the numbers haven’t been very high.
The alternatives, even the green ones like hydroelectric, have dwarfed nuclear-related deaths hundreds, if not thousands, of times over with single catastrophes[0].
Arguments against the storage of nuclear fuel usually don’t understand how little waste there is and, even still, burying a problem for 200 years while we figure out how to deal with it is an infinite number of times better than dealing with the fallout of global warming by not shifting to nuclear energy.
I'm actually pro nuclear, but I get concerned when I see people downplaying the risks. The only way we can have safe nuclear is if people actually understand and take the risks seriously and put oversight and safeguards in place. E.g. saying that Chernobyl is the "worst that could happen" is just willfully ignorant. Chernobyl was bad but could have been a lot worse.
Even then, nobody even knows or agrees how many victims Chernobyl have claimed or will still claim.
Comparing nuclear-related deaths to the Chinese dam disaster is a bit disingenuous also. China did not have nuclear power in the same time period, so of course no nuclear-related deaths happened. But if China had had enough nuclear plants to replace dams and they had the same amount of construction errors, removal of safety features, bad management and a "once in 2000 years" unforeseen natural disaster - are you sure no nuclear accidents would have happened?
If you just compare absolute numbers, you will see walking is more dangerous than skydiving.
> anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl
The miniseries makes it clear that the absolute worst outcomes at Chernobyl were prevented through huge effort: water was drained from the tanks under the meltdown, so there was no steam explosion that would have smashed the other reactor cores as well. The meltdown then did not burn through the concrete and into the groundwater table.
Looks like you followed my next step too, jumped into the comment section to see if someone posted about an interesting highlight that I might have missed by skipping the rest of the article :)